> by itself it looks like a fairly reasonable set of choices.

I have not tried this myself, so I can not speak from experience, but if they have removed features that people used, then they are in a similar situation as wayland. So I don't see what the difference then would be. Perhaps your analysis was also incomplete?

I consider Wayland's choices reasonable as well. I.e. I it's not surprising that a reasonable attempt to clean up X ends up looking similar to Wayland, just in a slightly different place on the xy graph that has backwards compat and cleanup as its axis.